


stitches

by randomhorse



Category: True Detective
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, M/M, Stitches, Wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-04 01:18:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1761639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomhorse/pseuds/randomhorse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no way in hell Rust is going back to the hospital to get his stitches out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stitches

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Stitches 缝线](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1833085) by [Virgil (alucard1771)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alucard1771/pseuds/Virgil)



There’s no way in hell Rust is going back to the hospital to get his stitches out.

The knots sit on the soft pink scar tissue, like fat ticks, twenty-nine of them, in a lopsided, y-shaped constellation north of his navel. To count them he has to lean forward, make his flesh wrinkle, distort the arrangement. It hurts.

Rust clasps his knife tighter. The light is dim in Marty’s green tiled bathroom, but it’s the only room Rust can lock from the inside, and if Marty sees him doing this he’s going to drag him off to the hospital, or worse, to Maggie, without Rust standing much of a chance. It needed a six inch stab wound to the gut to make Marty physically superior to him, but here they are.

  
The tip of the knife cuts through the first thread easily. Rust keeps it clean and sharp. This morning, he boiled it in Marty’s only pot to minimize the risk of infection, the one that’s usually reserved for tin can goods.

 

Rust doesn’t exactly dislike being touched. Not anymore. For years, back right after it happened, a touch was all it needed to bring his daughter back, to roll him over with a wave of emotions – a weakness he couldn’t afford in his line of work. Ironically, it was his line of work that numbed him to them eventually. Four years in the field will do that to you. Four years of getting high and living tense and gritty in a world in which personal space is not a common good but a mark of the superior.

Crash never ranked high enough to create that sense of anti-gravity around him. Strangely enough, apparently Rust Cohle, the Rust Cohle he became when he left Texas for good in 1993, seemed to do that easily. It didn’t surprise Rust, not really, it made sense in an odd way, and still he regarded the fact with a certain amount of confusion. He seems to repulse people by nature, not by choice. It took Marty three months to ask him to come for dinner, and even then it was only a chore Maggie asked of him.

 

The ink stains stayed on Rust’s skin long after he’d washed off the blood, as if only to remind him of what hurt most: what was before.

His hands used to be incredibly steady, which made him an exceptional shot, a skilled mechanic and – if his wife was to be trusted – an attractive smoker. He was fixing his father’s fountain pen, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, in the low afternoon light painting swirls and spots on his desktop when he heard the crash. All he ever did, afterwards, seemed to be an effort to regain that steadiness.

  
His blackened fingertips had left marks on his daughter’s skin where he’d touched her face, and when he had picked her up, and her head had rolled to the side against his white shirt, she had left red marks on him. And for a long time after, his fingertips wouldn’t stop shaking, as if resonating with this last touch. Everything turned to soft baby flesh underneath his fingers, he could feel a heartbeat in all things, a shallow one, slowly fainting.

He didn’t touch Claire anymore.

 

Rust takes a moment to ponder the word “friend” and the odd implications it has coming from Marty. Over the years, there have been many labels he put on the man, colleague, partner. Fucking dickhead. He wonders if Marty is a friend now, and if so, what bought this change about. Is bleeding out in a satanic church, hands pressed on the other’s wounds, a necessary requirement? Is breaking the other out of the hospital? Pulling their stitches?

Friends are not something Rust has had an abundance of. Lovers. Allies. None of them he would have called his friends. Marty is and has always been his partner. He wonders if Marty would think it rude, if Rust called him that. Marty, who, going by the evidence of what he says and does for Rust, considers him a friend.

Rust doesn’t make friends. Friendship implicates a type of intimacy he’s not capable of anymore, maybe he never has been. There is something between him and Marty, there’s no denying it. Trust. Loyalty. Caring. Love, maybe, in whatever stunted way they’re still capable of feeling it. Not intimacy.

 

It’s a fucking enigma, feeling. One would think that Rust feels less these days, because what could ever measure up to the abundance of emotions soaring through one’s brain in the moment of death, but he doesn’t.

He feels differently.

He feels things tugging on his heart strings, little things, sentimentalities he never even acknowledged before. He still feels the existential weight of things but instead of drowning all other emotions, like it used to, now it enhances them. Like a dark backdrop for fireflies.

 

Rust finds himself leaning into Marty’s touches.

 

Rust manages to make it through five stitches until his hands start shaking and he feels like throwing up. It’s not so much pulling threads out of his own torn flesh that makes him gag. He’s seen worse, hell, he’s done worse. It’s the fact that for the first time in weeks he needs his hands to be steady. He did a good job ignoring it while he was in the hospital, and even here, with Marty, he didn’t use them much for anything but making coffee, but now, having to force his fingers to steady precision he can’t help but see how hopelessly he fails.

 

“For fuck’s sake, Rust”, Marty says and takes the knife from his limp fingers. “For fuck’s sake, man.”

Rust leans to the sink in front of him, his forehead pressed to the cold surface, closes his eyes and embraces the darkness. Marty’s hand rests on his back, heavily, anchoring.

The breaking latch has left a deep dent in the wood of the doorframe.


End file.
